To prevent a risk of an accident and provide convenience in parking, many users are equipping a vehicle with a black box or a function of a rear view camera.
Accordingly, recently, developed is an around view monitor (AVM) system configured to mount cameras on left and right sides as well as front and rear of a vehicle and thereby output a view on a display as if a total of four cameras are looking down from above the vehicle.
The AVM system is designed to compose images acquired from cameras mounted all around the vehicle, thereby enabling a user to conveniently observe the surroundings through a monitor disposed inside of the vehicle.
However, in the AVM system according to the related art, brightness of images acquired from the respective cameras mounted on the vehicle differs from each other and thus, a composite image of the images is unnatural. Accordingly, the user may not have the natural perception for the composite image.
Also, a method of composing and thereby displaying images of an in-vehicle camera according to the related art, calculates image brightness using an average value of the entire pixels belonging to an image. Accordingly, due to another object or shadow, an error occurs when averaging a value of brightness or gain and thus, an accurate brightness correction is difficult to achieve.